They’re going to back off on this and replace it with something bad but not as horrible. This is testing the water, and opens the door to charging everyone money every time you install a game, not just devs.
Have an install saved on your external and want to install it next week? You’ll get charged for it as of you didn’t already pay for it.
Games you have in your steam/gog backlog? Get charged again for it when you decide to play it.
I guarantee there are investors/publishers/whoever hitting themselves right now screaming “why didn’t I think of that?”.
I think they might actually get told to fuck off by publishers, strictly because they wouldn't be making any money out of it on top of the bad publicity being passed down to them by consumers.
That’s part of the problem; they aren’t charging you for the install, they are remotely tracking that you’ve done so and then billing the dev for it.
If you grab a cracked version, did the person cracking that game also remove the install telemetry, or did they just make it functional? Can you be sure?
In many cases, the dev would still be billed for you installing the game you didn’t even pay for. Unity has no incentive to ensure each install is legitimate, as they profit from failing to catch that.
Launch the game offline. Which if you’ve ever done with a game made in the last 5 or so years and launching legitamitly, it is increasingly harder to do so.
I take my gaming laptop into work. I can launch older games without an internet connection, but stuff like red dead redemption 2 doesn’t like to start offline – presumably due to telemetry.
Hm. I guess if one can reverse the code and sniff the network then one can probably figure out all but the most sophisticated phone home evasion. Just like with cracking games, eventually someone figures it all out. Game crackers will have to add network monitoring to their toolkit if they haven’t yet I guess.
I guess the only way to be sure is to not buy those games.
My only issue there is you, as an end user installing these cracks, don’t really have a way to be sure it was removed (unless you yourself know the details of and block the phone home). It’ll have no effect on you either way, but it’ll certainly effect the dev if you miss it; it’s only gotta get through once (per install), maybe it tries until it succeeds.
I very much agree with various developers decisions to change engines. I feel for the ones that don’t really have that option.
To be clear, I’m specifically taking about pirated versions, which I figure the people using have enough interest in doing to know how or figure out how to do something like that, or even have it disabled at the start by the game crackers.
When I started Pirating games, I was just a young broke kid that wanted to play some games. I didn’t know about or even think to look into stuff like this; I just looked for working cracks.
Even now, if I hadn’t already known of this, I wouldn’t think to look for it.
I’m just saying that, between standard users and pirates, the latter is much more likely to know about and act on something like this. And, like I said, it’s also quite likely that the crackers themselves will have a workaround implemented from the start.
Sounds like pirating a copy and then trying some network fuckery... Fun!
But also if they make it bad enough I'll just do something else. I love games but if they wanna fuck that up bad enough then there are always other ways to kill time.
This is already how it works with poorly cracked games/software. The games’ crack.nfo (readme) will say something like: - Copy the .exe to the /bin/ folder, add the .exe to your windows firewall or otherwise prevent it from accessing the internet.
Maybe the gaming industry needs another collapse.
AAA needs a shake up, that’s for sure, if it’s just going to continue on it’s current trajectory of “nothing new but costs more”.
Most of the AAA’s can’t even be bothered to include as much content and as many systems as games from decades ago. You can play PlayStation 1 & 2 games that are just as complex or more complex than games releases recently. It’s all the same stuff but with more pixels and larger localization folders.
Why is Skyfield 130 GBs when at it’s core it has all the same functions as Oblivion or Fallout? Why does Octopath Traveller have a sliver of the in-game content that games like Star Ocean and Final Fantasy 9 had? Sports games and Shooters were lost causes years ago.
Indie devs have been making games that are far more fun and original than most AAA teams of multiple hundreds have been able to do in awhile.
The big guys need to return to focusing on fun. Some AAA’s can still do it. BG3 and Zelda are the current obvious examples. Those games are Fun. That’s what games are supposed to be.
Also, battle passes and season passes and everything that horse armor spawned can all go in the trash when there is another video game collapse.
Comparing Octopath Traveller to FF9 isn’t really fair. One was an entry on Squares premiere series with tons of money behind it, the other is a side project made by a side team with far less resources. Starfield is a big install as it’s using far higher quality textures than previous Bethesda games, probably higher quality audio too.
EA has been doing this for years. Except they were nearly infinitesimally nicer about it and gave you X installs per key, with the caveat that you had to burn hours on their support line to get it reset.
I think the real problem is how shady it seems. Like has everyone forgotten the concept of “grandfather in”? People will make new games in unity if they factor in the cost. I think people are understanding if they have the priory knowledge that unity needs to maybe start charging something. But sounds like they are asking for after these businesses already have created budgets. It sounds like it could be a bit of extortion depending on what the original agreement was. " Extortion might involve … damage to a companies financial well being."
Will Garry Newman decide to reskill his devs to use Godot? Will anybody with enough power decide to do so? Imagine if game studios big and small decided “we don’t want to have to deal with this ever again, we’re making a new or investing in an existing opensource game engine”.
Will Garry Newman decide to reskill his devs to use Godot?
Ehhh, I doubt it. His team is currently working on Source 2 for their game S&Box. I would expect he’s pretty close with Valve so he might just use Source 2 for the foreseeable future.
Do you really need him to cite sources on easily verifiable info? Just look it up and move on if you really need to check. Rust being made before source 2 released isn’t exactly some crazy idea
Oh, gotcha. So in the case of source 1, I don’t think it would handle the seamless open world very well, or any of the building mechanics. Given that he’s also the creator of Gary’s mod, I’m sure he considered source 1 and rejected it due to its limitations. Even 10 years ago source was pretty out dated. It’s kind of shocking what Titanfall was able to achieve with it, but they modified it pretty extensively.
My guess is Source 2 just not being ready until recently. They originally started work with UE4 but made some of their work engine agnostic so they could move to Source 2 when they were able to.
Since you clearly know so much better, please tell me what open-source game engine he was meant to develop on instead. The game engine needs to be of a quality you can use to professionally develop, release, and maintain a complex multiplayer game on. It also needs to have been fully viable to use before 2013.
It’s one thing to take issue with industry trends, it’s quite another to say that anyone who has made a Unity project instead of taking a gamble on FOSS is a bad person and personally responsible for anything that happens to them. Talk about victim blaming.
Which is clearly so much worse than using an inferior tool for the job, releasing a crappy product, and never making any money in the first place. Completely detached from reality.
As far as I know, and as far as I’ve seen in other discussions, they are essentially changing the terms of service of signed contracts unilaterally, which in many places should be an instant lose if taken to court.
I think Unity would be the one losing in court, especially since they changed the terms of service right before making this change, which is applied retroactively. That’s not how a contract works.
I can’t just write “Btw the house is being given free of charge from the bank to the tenant” on my lease to get rid of my mortgage
With your own example, the bank can’t just come one day and say “btw, the house you bought 10 years ago? Yeah, we just decided that it’s price is now double, so you owe us for the 10 years you paid half of what you should”
Everyone I know has been reaching about Unreal for the past few years anyway. I’m surprised Unity is pulling this controversial move in this situation, driving more customers to the competition. It’s like if it was 2013 and AMD suddenly started charging double for their graphics cards even though Nvidia was way better
Oh damn the whole day I was thinking it was about Unreal Engine, not unity. Was pretty sad that some of the projects I follow could be abandoned. Now I’m so glad, holy shit. Reading the articles caffeine starved at 5 am in a tram probably was the culprit for misreading
Their Twitter is even leaning into the “answering questions” angle. Just frame the backlash as a result of ignorance, rather than people being reasonably upset by a situation they understand perfectly well. Then they dodge inconvenient questions about things like malicious automated downloads. Of course, they’re happy to “listen to feedback.” Not act on it, of course, but the social media person is happy to scroll past whatever you have to say!
Now, I’m a Linux user and really don’t like Unity the game engine. Unity the desktop was cool, on a side note, even though I’ve never used it for long periods of time.
Sure but then we just get back around to the whole “why don’t people just build their own engine” arguement.
If I am making a game then I don’t want to spend time building out an engine first. I am very grateful to the people who do spend their time updating the engine but I don’t actually have the time.
And then we just go back around to the “too bad, we don’t have a choice” argument. We don’t have a choice. The fact that it’s hard or inconvenient to make one doesn’t change the fact that we have to. Stop being lazy and focus on making or improving a free open-source engine so you can make games. Priorities first. You can’t make a game without a suitable engine so you don’t have a choice regardless of any other consideration or circumstance.
Life is not always easy or convenient. Often, it’s the opposite. And you have to deal with that.
The fact that it’s hard or inconvenient to make one doesn’t change the fact that we have to. Stop being lazy and focus on making or improving a free open-source engine so you can make games.
You seem to underestimate the immense amount of work a good quality engine requires. It’s not about being lazy or having some neglectable inconveniences. For a lot of, especially smaller, developers this is a matter of financial survival.
Open source is cool, but requires dedicated regular contributors. The more work there is to do, the more important this and the number of contributors is. And there are not enough good engineers who like to dedicate their free time for such unpaid work. This just doesn’t work very well with such a capitalistic economy system that we have now.
Licenses and copyright laws. When you make a game with Unity, you’re using proprietary code from Unity which has a license stating that the free version can only be used under certain circumstances. You’d be braking this license agreement if you distribute a game outside those conditions
How could they enforce such a thing? Just incorporate in another country and put the money there. Accept payment for micro transactions in Bitcoin. It’s not like they could take a foreign company to court; you just have to pick the right country that doesn’t honor such things.
The thing about unity is that it’s not just a software you use to program the game. When you distribute the game, you also distribute the engine. Since the engine is licensed to you under a special license, distributing it in a way that’s not permitted is copyright infringement. You agree to the license when you use unity, it’s like signing a contract. And if you breach this contract, Unity has all the rights to take legal action against you for profiting off their proprietary engine without paying them.
It also just doesn’t make sense to even try that. If you’re at the point where you’d have to share your profits with unity, your game will be making enough sales that it’s probably big enough for unity to notice it. And if you manage to keep your copyright infringement hidden from them, then your game is probably so small that you wouldn’t be paying anyways.
So yeah, it’s simply illegal, and unity will take legal action if they’re losing out on enough money
Licensing and copyright infringement doesn’t mean jack shit if you do business with an entity from a country that doesn’t respect such things. Even lawsuits wouldn’t do anything in that case. And even if Unity went to the press about it, you could just hold up a giant middle finger and people would still buy your game.
Good luck selling your game if unity asks every distributor to remove your game for copyright infringement.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, you can go ahead and try. But you asked what stops people and the answer is laws. If it was so easy to do what you’re suggesting, then everyone would do it
If you’re at the point where you’d have to share your profits with unity, your game will be making enough sales that it’s probably big enough for unity to notice it. And if you manage to keep your copyright infringement hidden from them, then your game is probably so small that you wouldn’t be paying anyways.
From my experience that is not true. Unity has a very dedicated team of lawyers who are constantly looking out for possible licence infringiments. And they would rather inquire twice than to ignore someone for being “too small to notice”.
How I made this experience: In univeristy I worked on a research project regarding immersion in gaming. We used Unity for creating virtual environments to conduct our experiments. For that we acquired a couple of education licenses which were strictly bound to non-profit usage. In return we got them for free. Some months later we received mail from Unitiy lawyers who suspected that we broke the terms of our license. The matter was cleared up after a while. But still, I was astonished by the dedication and energy they invested. It makes sense though. Their business depends on it.
Because if you don’t, and later they pursue the legal route, there’s not much you can do, you agree to their terms or fight a lawsuit where they’ll likely take everything
People wrote their own game engines since the earliest of games, they just want the easy route today and a marketplace to monetize on. These are poisoned gifts, and always have been.
Yeah let me just make my own fucking game engine right quick because that’s definitely easier than using another one that a team made and continues to make, support, and add onto because
“It’s easier”
Come on dude you’re just talking out of your ass. You should read about Cynicism and why nobody fucking likes that shit
You don’t have to reproduce Unity to create your game. You just need to write what you need. And you could also chose an actual free software project instead of something where they pull the rug right out from under you. If you look at the choice today, with the rug already having been pulled, would you not consider the choice an obvious mistake in hindsight? Every other project these days loses money by trying to build a following which they will then monetize on. I’m sorry for people who walked right into this trap, but it could have been avoided by making better choices in the past. Sorry if you disagree, but I’ve been around long enough to recognize these recurring patterns with “free” software.
Great analogy, but this is a wheel you’re being charged for, after you’ve installed it on your product. Maybe you would have been better suited with your own wheel.
You’re not picking an existing good wheel solution that you can use forever, you basically took a promise for a free wheel that you’re now being charged for, and you’re sad because the free wheel isn’t free anymore. Well, maybe you should have picked an actually free wheel to begin with.
Unity is not the only solution to your cart problem. You’re just using it, because it is convenient.
This isn’t a case of “I use unity because it is free,” because outside of recreational game developer use-cases, it isn’t free. There are very real costs associated with monetization that any developer, team, and studio should be aware of.
Developers who have been using unity with knowledge of their pricing mechanisms are being blindsided with new pricing, that you can’t opt-out of, with a little less than 3 months notice. Going back to the wheel analogy, these teams have designed entire vehicles around these wheels, with application-specific knowledge and workarounds to be told that “Hey, regarding that product which underpins your entire project, one with which we’ve already entered into a sales agreement… we decided we want to change the agreement and track its usage and charge you more money. You have 11 weeks to get over it. Your continued use of our product implies consent to the new terms of this agreement.”
You can’t just move to a different platform without significant amounts of rework.
Developers who have been using unity with knowledge of their pricing mechanisms are being blindsided with new pricing
I get that, and it sucks. But too many offerings on the market are nowadays accepted as normal operating procedure, when they seem like such obvious traps to me. There is no financially-driven company out there that you can rely on with your project. Go with an open-source project or write what you need yourself. I fully understand the challenge of writing a product from scratch and bringing it to market. Your dependencies can break your neck one way or the other.
You can’t just move to a different platform without significant amounts of rework.
I know and feel that. I am no longer in entertainment, but I also see these exact same patterns in my current line of work (IT infrastructure). People use “free” tools that they take for granted, and then they’re surprised by rug-pulls. This has been happening for so long in so many areas that it’s almost tiring.
C implementations are available as open-source. The glibc especially is a great example of this. This comparison is not good. I’m all for using open source
It’s not “the easy route”. Making a game engine is a tremendous investment these days. If you are making anything other than a game that looks like early 2000s or earlier, you need a pretty capable engine that takes years to develop. That’s on top of the time it costs to make a game, which is also typically years. Not to mention that your proprietary engine will have subpar tooling and make your game development slower.
For anyone but industry giants it’s not feasible to make a modern engine. Unless your game is not aiming to play and feel like a modern game, you have to run with an off-the-shelf engine.
You’re not listening. It’s not that it’s hard (although it definitely is), it’s literally just infeasible financially and time wise. You cannot spend millions developing an engine unless you are a large AAA studio. You can’t pull up your bootstraps your way into making a modern game engine within the budget you have to make a game.
As for Godot:
While games like Domekeeper and Luck Be a Landlord are great, they are made by two people and one person respectively. It has not proven itself as an engine capable of supporting the type of development cycle and team necessary for larger projects.
The best games released in Godot are visually vastly inferior to anything you can whip up in other commercial engines. Its focus has been on 2D, and the 3D games released in it don’t look great. Users expect more from bigger budget games.
Godot is very new. Many games started development in its infancy, and some before it was even released as open source. Not to mention that most studios have existed much longer and are already established in an older engine, with lots of capital and knowledge locked up in those softwares. There is a lot of inertia to adapting new technology.
I said this in other comments earlier, you don’t need to rewrite Unity to build your game. Build what you need, or pick up an open source product and add what you need. I don’t understand why people bring up financial feasibility if you’re being charged now for a wrong choice in the past. This was to be expected. It’s always the same pattern. If you can’t figure out how create your game without some false promise product, then don’t build your game. It’s really as easy as that.
It’s not that it’s hard (although it definitely is), it’s literally just infeasible financially and time wise.
And yet somehow Godot exists.
Somehow, they managed to build a viable 2D and 3D open source engine without a massive AAA studio so clearly your assumptions are just wrong.
You just don’t like being told you have to take responsibility for a problem someone else caused, and to that, I don’t blame you. It’s not right that we have to go through any of this. But honestly, it’s time for us millennials to realize that putting in the elbow grease to build alternatives to what others have done to us isn’t doing that, it’s us building the infrastructure to allow us to move on from the powers that be, and if you want to break away from them, you have to. Your abusers will not liberate you for you.
You have no idea what you’re talking about my guy. First off, Godot has been in development since 2007. That’s 16 years ago. Secondly, Godot started in Codenix, a consulting company that made money by licensing then-closed-source Godot. They only made it open source in 2014 - 7 years into development. This is a company that made its money through selling a game engine, not through making games. Thirdly, Godot receives funding from massive companies (e.g. they received $250k in funding from Epic Games in 2020). Fourthly, Godot is not up to par with Unreal Engine or Unity. It’s NOT a viable game engine for many games being developed.
Edit: also, I’m not a milennial. I’m a zoomer. No, I’m not too young to have an opinion on this, I’ve been making games for 15 years.
Well, now that it is open-source, we ought to take advantage of it, fork it and mod it up to our specifications. Or just make our own from scratch.
You don’t have a choice if you don’t want corporations to continue holding your dick in a vice. Bitch all you want; those are your options and sometimes in life you have to grow up and make hard choices that require a lot of effort, grit, determination, knowledge and courage to better your life and the lives of those around you. You want change? You better put in the elbow grease to make it happen. The only one who’s going to suffer if you don’t is you.
That is a hard lesson my generation refused to learn, and we suffer endlessly because of it. Don’t be like us in that aspect, please.
Edit: also, I’m not a milennial. I’m a zoomer.
The mindset I was addressing largely afflicts us millennials and isn’t targeted toward you. I’m not talking only to you through these comments but also to anybody else reading them, just to clarify.
You’re not wrong that creating FOSS technologies is a worthwhile pursuit. I think what you’re missing is how massive a game engine is. The average game development company simply cannot be creating its own engine or forking Godot to create a game in.
It requires a large company dedicated to engine development and tooling, and at least a decade of development, to create a worthwhile engine. If you want to make a game, fronting that development with a decade of engine development is not financially sensible. This issue is not one that game development companies can fix.
That said, if Godot meets your game and team’s needs (or reasonably close to where you can reasonably develop the engine further to meet them), go for it. But it’s not realistic for most developers.
You sound like you dont know anything about programming (at least engine programming). Most Engines have to run in something like assembly, else they would be too slow. (They use others too but Assembly is in like all, i am a junior dev so i could be wrong)
Assembly is already a large hurdle.
I mean it is “simple” as the arch linux type of “simple”. (Nothing more than you need to run it and nothing more)
So the option is to learn assembly or hire someone (or multiple) who can, good luck by finding one that is capable of developing an engine that does not suck and does not cost a fortune.
Then you need to know what the engine should do.
If you “only” need 2D or even only some system to interact with the console you will be fine, maybe.
3D is a bit more complicated, the reason why there are so much 2D/2,5D games out supports this claim.
Then particle support if you want it…
Every feature you want has to be supported!
And every feature costs and maybe needs maintenance when bugs occur. Supporting an operating system is a feature too :)
So the engine has to be updated when a mayor OS update comes out
There are more points for why not to make an own engine and use one of the marked that fits ones needs even if it is closed source.
You where so fond of Godot so trying to help them might be a good starting point for you to life your ideals. I sincerely dont want to mock you with the sentence. If you can successfully help a larger open source project everyone is happy. If you can learn something new i am sure it can benefit you. I was only a bit mad because it felt like you are comparing engines with “weekend projects” what they are definitely not in the slightest.
Except it doesn’t matter. No matter how hard of a pursuit it is, it is one you have to do because you don’t have any other choice at this point. You can’t let corporations dominate humanity because building meaningful alternatives is “too hard”. People are the ones who build those engines in the first place and if that means you have to bust ass learning comp sci to do it yourself or contribute to an effort doing it, you still have to do it.
Nothing in life is easy. Do the research, learn the skillsets and material you need, and do it. No matter how hard or expensive it is, now you have to put in the work and the money.
It’s either that or serfdom. Your choice. I won’t lose any sleep if you refuse to though – I’ll just use Godot, add to it when I need and move on from you myself. It’s up to you whether you’re gonna do the same and save yourself.
I’d like to jump out of the system for a moment and opine a few things:
People on Lemmy are generally fully aware of FOSS and support it
People on Lemmy are generally not the type who want to hand over everything to a few corporations
Even so, you’re being downvoted to oblivion
And there’s a very good reason for that: you are vastly understating how difficult it is to make something on the level of Unity or Unreal, and people here can see it. It’s not merely difficult, but completely out of reach for anyone without hundreds of millions of existing revenue. Open source is not going to get you there anytime soon. By the time it could even get to the current level of the big two engines, those two would have already moved on to something even better.
It’s not a choice between a corporate licensed engine or an open source one or an in-house one. It’s a choice between a corporate engine and having a finished product in any kind of reasonable time frame, or having a finished product that’s anything close to modern looking.
Now, I happen to agree with the statement “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding”. So if that’s what you’re getting at, then I agree. But know that this is what you’re asking for.
Literally no one cares if I am being downvoted or not. I don’t. No one else does. The only one immature enough to think being downvoted on some open source platform is a problem is you.
If I cared, I wouldn’t say a fifth of a third of a quarter of the insane bullshit I spew out of this account every day.
You’re also not listening to what I’m telling you because you don’t really want to put forth the effort to do anything to better your situation, you want a positive solution handed to you and more importantly you want your emotions catered to, and neither of those beefs is my problem. That’s all on you. I won’t cater to your emotions or spare your feelings. Others even pointed you to an easy solution, Godot, and you still whine. Therefore the problem is you.
I will be over here chilling and using Godot while you whine, cry and complain. The only one who’s gonna suffer is you. 😎
That’s a naive way of pretending to be above it all. People downvote for a reason, and it can be useful to think about those reasons. Meanwhile, while complaining that "You’re also not listening to what I’m telling you . . . " while clearly not even bothering to address most of my points.
You can sit there and try to convince me to care all you want; I’m not going to.
Even back on .world when I told you all to get rid of the downvote feature, you all told me that downvotes were unimportant and anyone who openly cared about them is a massive autistic nerd who desperately needs to go touch grass. Now when I don’t care and you do, you complain because now you can’t weaponize them to try to control me.
And that is, far and away, a you problem.
Now you can choose to waste more of your precious time on this Earth trying to get one over on me and failing or you can do what I told you to do: use Godot or make your own engine. Your choice, fam.
Assembly usage is pretty minor in these engines. Tends to be for just a few very tight loops. It has to be redone for every platform, too. Assembly for x86-64 doesn’t work on ARM. Hell, some things on 32-bit x86 won’t even work on x86-64. You would never want to do more than a function of inline ASM here or there. It’d be a nightmare if you did.
That said, it’s barely even touching on the complexity of modern engines. Unity and Unreal aren’t just engines, they’re a whole development ecosystem.
I’ll grant you, Unity has been a commercial standard that many large and good games have been made in, Godot hasn’t. Godot has been used largely by solo creators or small teams which has limited the scope and detail of the artwork in Godot games thus far.
This begs the question: What’s the best looking solo-developed Unity game?
Does that game include a lot of purchased/sourced assets? Should that count as “solo” developed then? Given the contents of Steam’s catalog, by sheer volume of titles it seems that Unity is THE engine for creating low effort shit-tier asset flip “games” that are little more than a tutorial project file with a retail price. “Games made in Unity” is a LOT of rough to look for diamonds in.
Once you’ve found the best looking solo-developed Unity game, ask yourself this: Could this game be remade in Godot? Is Godot technically capable of running a game like this?
I’m also unconvinced that Godot is inherently a poor choice for larger development teams. It has built-in support for versioning systems such as Git, and its modular node-in-scene system mean that different team members could work on different components independently, then bring their work together as a whole. There’s also that whole aspect where the Godot editor is itself a Godot “game” that runs in the Godot engine, which means it’s possible for developers to create their own extensions to the editor using the same skills needed to make games.
Beyond that, much of the work on graphics–3D art, level design, character/creature design, rigging, animation–a lot of that is going to be done in an art package like Blender rather than Godot. And yes I would suggest Blender for the same reason I’d suggest Godot, because Adobe and Autodesk are also pulling the same kinds of enshitification that Unity is.
The real reason that Unity is the industry standard? Because it’s what they teach in school. “Learn Unity because that’s what they use in the industry.”
Sorry but if large teams could pick up Godot and make next-gen games with it just like that, they would. You can’t. You can find absolutely stunning looking projects from solo creators in Unreal Engine. Sure you have assets from the asset store. That’s the point - you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
I agree with everything you’re saying, but it’s still the easy route and it’s still a poisoned gift, as can be seen by this story. People rather pick the “free” and capable tool than investing time in an open-source solution that needs more work, or developing from scratch. Maybe they just want to reach more platforms to make more money, or use the super advanced tools, but that doesn’t change that you’re picking the path of least resistance, and you might pay for it in the end.
Chances are, if you’re expecting to compete with industry giants on the same level, you’re already investing massively into the production of assets and you’re project in general. You’re just skipping the investment in the engine and tooling. If you just want to make a small game, then maybe you don’t even need Unity and would be better off with something more tailored to your project.
I just can’t feel sorry for people who walked into this trap. I feel like this pattern has been occurring way too frequently to ignore the danger of “free” tools that really aren’t.
Plus when you break it down you’ll still need 3rd party software in order to do anything more than a console only application (OpenGL, directX, Havok, Bink etc)
People wrote their own game engines since the earliest of games
Lazy gets, using someone else’s programming language. They should have developed their own language and written the compiler before starting to write a games engine for the game they wanted to make.
Developing a good and feature rich game engine which also runs performant is a huge effort. That alone can cost a good team 2 years at least. Even more if we consider todays graphic standards. That’s nothing which smaller studios can easily deliver. So yeah, it’s an obvious decision to buy a license for a proprietary engine, where a lot of work has already went into. That’s just business and nothing crazy about it. Companies using services or products of other companies is pretty ordinary.
FOSS alternatives to Unity exist though. And from my personal experience it looks like Godot seems like the better engine anyways. Not to mention the fact that there is no need for a game engine to create a game. Opengl + a windowing/utility library is ideal.
I turned down a job offer at a company that relied solely on twitter’s api in order to accomplish their goals. It was a sales lead generation tool that used a scripted approach to warming leads before handing them off to AE’s to bring home.
Within a year Twitter shut down their access and the company went under. That’s the day I learned not to trust another company to allow you to make money with their product permanently.
I worked for a company that used Google application engine for all of their cloud tools and services. Then one day Google flipped a new billing process and the entire thing became more expensive than self hosting. Sure gae would let us scale to support insane levels but the product was never going to need that scale.
Any aws pipeline I build I write as agnostically as possible, and usually write basic ideas and selections from another platform into my docs and proposals.
It’s happened twice in my career that a shop had totally jumped provider, which isn’t a lot but is enough to keep one eye open
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